A content provider can store information that will be made available to content readers. For example, a financial company might store hundreds of thousands of documents (e.g., investment reports, stock charts, and market predictions) that will be made available to customers via a Web site.
The content provider may also want to provide a content reader with information that will likely be of interest to that particular content reader. For example, one content reader may be interested in accessing documents associated with one industry while another content reader is interested in accessing documents associated with another industry.
To facilitate a content reader's ability to access information that will likely be of interest, it is known that a content provider can categorize information. For example, a content provider can associate a document with one or more “key” words. Similarly, a content provider can categorize information such that documents associated with one category (e.g., an “Automotive Industry” category) are associated with one branch of a directory structure while documents associated with another category (e.g., an “Airline Industry” category) are associated with another branch. In this way, a content reader can navigate through the directory structure and locate information that will likely be of interest.
There are a number of disadvantages, however, with these approaches. For example, a content reader may not be able to efficiently provide key words to the content provider (e.g., he or she might mistakenly request information associated with “US Corporations” as opposed to “US Companies”) and/or be unable to effectively navigate through a directory structure to locate information that will likely be of interest (e.g., he or she may not realize that Daimler-Chrysler is associated with a “German Companies” directory as opposed to a “US Companies” directory). This may be particularly difficult when the information is associated with investment research due to the large number of potential types of investments, the frequency at which this kind of information changes (e.g., daily, weekly, or occasionally), and the importance of providing such information to customers in a timely manner.
In addition, a content reader's interests may not be easily categorized by simple key words and/or directory structures. For example, a content reader may only be interested in information about MICROSOFT® if the information was generated by a particular investment advisor. Similarly, a single content reader may be interested in a number of different types of information (e.g., associated with his or her different investments).
Moreover, a content provider may not want make all information available to every content reader. That is, the content provider may want to restrict particular content readers to a subset of the information that might be otherwise available. For example, a content reader might provide payment to the content provider in order to access additional information. Similarly, important customers may be given enhanced access to information, or content readers in a particular geographic region may be allowed to access information different from what is available to content readers in other regions.
Such an attempt to limit the information that can be accessed some content readers may be inefficient. Consider a content reader who asks to receive ten articles associated with a particular investment. In this case, the content provider may search through a large amount of information and generate a list of ten articles associated with that investment. After further reviewing these articles, however, the content provider determines that the content reader does not have access to seven of those articles. As a result, the content provider needs to resume searching for additional articles. Such an approach may be time consuming and resource-intensive for the content provider, especially when a large number of articles, content readers, and/or requests are involved.